Flower of Hades

Found nowhere else in the world, Dactylanthus taylorii, the “wood rose”, is a parasitic plant that lives underground, wrapped around the roots of native trees. Inside the swollen stem of the plant a wonderful transformation occurs, resulting in an elegant “flower” made solely of wood.

Which flowering plant has no green leaves and no roots, looks like a taro with Warts, has flowers with no petals, and smells something like a fer­mented corn cob?

The answer is Dactylanthus taylo­rii, variously known as “Daccy”, “flower of Hades”, “fingers of the gods” or “wood rose”.

This unusual plant grows only in New Zealand, and only in the North Island. It is a parasite, living on the roots of forest shrubs and trees such as Pittosporum, Schefflera and Pseu­dopanax. It doesn’t have a photosyn­thetic cell in its body, and derives all its nutrients from the host root, which it radically deforms until it looks like a cluster of carved wooden petals.

The genus Dactylanthus, of which taylorii is the only species, is a member of a family of root parasites found mainly in the tropics. That quirk of geological history which bequeathed to these shores the tua­tara, kakapo and other unique crea­tures also gave us the sole southern representative of the Balanopho­raceae: the wood rose.

To be accurate, the name “wood rose” should only be applied to the deformed root of the host plant ­there is nothing woody about Dac­tylanthus itself. The main part of the plant is a swollen underground stem or rhizome (bamboo and kikuyu grass also have rhizomes). Though subter­ranean, the rhizome is never so far below the surface that its asparagus-like flowering shoots cannot push up through the forest litter and humus.

It is only during the short flowering season, from February to early April, that the presence of the plant is really noticeable. During these months a profusion of pinky-brown flowers, each one a few centimetres in diameter, studs the forest floor above each plant. The rest of the year Dactylanthus is invisible — unless the soil above it has been eroded, in which case the hard, warty top of the rhizome may be seen.

Even the term “flower” is not strictly correct. Dactylanthus flow­ers are inflorescences made up of between 10 and 40 fleshy stalks called spadices, each one bearing around 50 highly simplified flowers. In the male, the flower is little more than a single pollen-bearing stamen;in the female, it is more or less just a pistil. Daisy and dandelion flowers are also examples of inflorescences: dozens of “mini-flowers” making up the bloom we see.

Flowering, though brief, is pro­lific. Each plant may produce up to 60 inflorescences per season, giving a total of 120,000 flowers. However. despite such an enormous reproduc­tive capacity. Dactylanthus seems to have barely held its own in the plant world, and is now in serious decline.Once found from Hokianga in the north to almost as far south as Wel­lington, the plants are now mainly confined to areas inland from East Cape, through the Central Plateau and south to Wanganui. The species is officially listed as vulnerable, which is to say that it is “under threat from serious adverse factors through­out its range.”

In the past, the main “adverse factor” has been two-legged in form: “Daccy hunters” who dug up the plants, roots and all, boiled off the rhizome and then sold the resulting wood rose (usually mounted and varnished) to souvenir shops.

One “hunter” used the ingenious method of placing his rhizomes in wire baskets which he then suspended in a geothermal pool at Wairakei. A few days later he would return to collect the stripped wood roses. The going price from Auck­land gift shops was a dollar a flower.

Lately, however, the finger is being pointed at the possum as the main agent of destruction. The succulent Dactylanthus shoots poking up through the leaf litter must represent an irresistible snack for a hungry possum, and the flowers’ powerful perfume would attract the voracious marsupials from a considerable dis­tance.

One person who is keen to prove a link between the increase in possum numbers and the decrease in Dac­tylanthus is Chris Ecroyd, the her­barium curator at the Forest Research Institute in Rotorua. For the last three years he has been visiting wood rose sites in the Mamaku Plateau, to the west of Rotorua, and in Pureora For­est, near Taupo, to study the impact of possums and rats on the plants.

Chris Ecroyd began to suspect possum damage after numerous unsuccessful attempts to find flowering Dactylanthus in the Mamaku Forest. He had no difficulty locating rhizomes, but the only flower stems he could find were ei­ther dead or damaged. To test the theory that animals were to blame, Chris set up a series of exclosure plots — wire netting cages placed over Dactylanthus rhizomes to keep out rats and possums. Within a week, the rhizomes inside the plots were covered with flowers — up to 30 or 40 each — while unprotected plants remained bare. Further experiments, in which the mesh size of the netting was varied (to allow the entrance of rats in some, but not others) have led Chris to conclude that possums are the main culprits in the demise of the wood rose.

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Dactylanthus Tayloriiwas named after its discoverer. Rev Richard Taylor, a mis­siunaly, explorer and naturalist who stumbled on the plant during a trek from Taupo to Wanganui in 1845. Thanks to his thoroughness as a di­ary-writer, we have an account of the exact moment of discovery:

“March 18, 1845 — It was a rainy night, and very cold, wet and cheer­less. In walking through the dense, humid forest I was soon as wet as if I had been in the water… I found the Parei myself today. It is certainly one of the most remarkable vegetable productions I have seen, and appears to be the union of fungus with the plant. I passed several, taking them for toadstools, but one more remark­able than the rest caused me to stop and gather it. I then found that it was a plant in full flower, although very much resembling a fungus. It has no leaves, and has a calyx containing a kind of pollen with rather a disagree­able smell. The Natives say it is more prolific than the potato, but will only grow in the forest.”

The name “Parei” is a mystery. The usual Maori names for the plant are “pua o te reinga”, or its shortened version “pua reinga”, and “waewae te atua”. In Maoridom, things that live underground have strong asso­ciations with the spirit world. The term waewae te atua, meaning fin­gers (or toes) of the gods, relates to the subterranean habit of the plant on the one hand, and its fingerlike flowering stems on the other. The English name “flower of Hades” is a distorted translation of pua o te re­inga. “Reinga” has associations with the spirit world, in that the spirits of the departed are said to leap from a sacred tree at Cape Reinga (at the northern tip of the North Island) before commencing their journey back to their mystical homeland, Hawaiki, but the concept of Hades is foreign to Maori spirituality.

While Taylor was quite right in his observation that the plant was not a fungus (a common misconcep­tion even today), he was incorrect in attributing the smell to the pollen. Dactylanthus flowers contain a rela­tively large amount of sweet-tasting nectar — up to one and a half millilitres in some specimens — and it is this which gives the flowers their characteristic bouquet. Early bota­nists described the fragrance as re­sembling ripe rock melons or daphne. though Taylor appears to have found the smell uninspiring — perhaps the flower was rotting. The smell is cer­tainly unlike that of any other plant in the New Zealand bush.

The possession of strong-smelling nectar is usually an indication that a flower is pollinated by insects, and this is so for Dactylanthus. Ants, beetles, small flies and, in more re­cent times, wasps have all been ob­served entering the flowers to sip the nectar. If all goes well (from the plant’s point of view) such visitors will re-emerge from the male flower with a liberal dusting of mealy white pollen. which they will then transfer to the female flowers. Successful pollination results in the production of tiny pepino-shaped seeds about the size of a radish seed.

Seeds may remain on the female spadices for over a year before falling to the ground: germination occurs in spring. The chances of the germinat­ing seed finding a root on which to bind must be very slim indeed. Unless there is a root of the correct type and thickness within about two milli­metres of the seed, its meagre food resources will be exhausted and the seedling will die.

The processes by which a germi­nating seed selects and attacks a root are unknown (presumably a chemi­cal stimulus is involved), but it is clear that the seed is very choosy.One tree may have a large number of Dactylanthus plants of various sizes living on its roots, while a nearby tree of the same species will have none. No one has yet been able to germinate and grow a seed artificially, and until this is done it is unlikely that the secrets of the Dactylanthus seed will be unravelled.

If the probing radicle of a germi­nated seed does find a suitable root­let, it somehow penetrates it and begins to take nutrients from the xylem and phloem of the host. Gradu­ally it builds up its rhizome around the root and diverts all nutrients to itself, causing the part of the root beyond the rhizome to die. Inside the rhizome the tissues are moist and spongy, and at the junction between root and parasite the tissues of each plant dovetail in a complex array of cells and structures that are still not understood. Whatever chemistry may be involved, it is here at the interface that the transformation from root to wood rose takes place: a work of natural artistry that is as remarkable as it is varied.

Hunting the Daccy

At 67 Nan Garland has found, seen and handled more Dactylanthus plants than possibly anyone else.

It’s not a claim she boasts about — or even makes, for that matter — but it’s one that no one cares to dispute. Among central North Island bushmen, and now conservation authorities, the Taumarunui woman is regarded as the “hands-on” authority on the wood rose.

The well-spoken retired school teacher, who helps teach Maori language in local schools on a voluntary basis, first came across Dactylanthus in the late 1940s when she and her hus­band Fred were living in a mill settlement at Taurewa, beneath Mt Ruapehu on the road be­tween National Park and Turangi.

With young children to care for, and a naturally inquiring mind, she took an avid interest in the pastime of one of the mill settlement’s residents who used to emerge from the bush with a sack on his back and large plants that he would boil up and clean to make ornaments from. This was her first encounter with the wood rose, or, in bushmen’s lingo, a “daccy” — a slang name she dislikes “because Dactylan­thusis such a beautiful-sound­ing word when it is spoken properly”.

Back then Nan Garland did not have time to take up the hobby of Dactylanthus collect­ing. But 15 years later she returned to the mill settlement site (then, and now, just a clearing beside the new highway from National Park to Turangi) to locate the exact point where the old bushman used to enter the forest. She wanted to find Dactylanthus for herself. Since then the wood rose has become an enduring and absorbing hobby.

Mrs Garland, whose maiden name was Kahureremoa Paoroa, is Tuwharetoa on her mother’s side and Ngapuhi on her father’s. As a young woman who had been brought up in strong Maori tradition and trained as a teacher, she was puzzled that in Maoritanga there was little mention of the wood rose or flower.

She went to her grandfather, who spoke no English, and asked what he knew about pua o to reinga, but he could not shed any more light than to explain the meaning of the name.

“He agreed with me that its name can only mean ‘of the spirit world’, and because of this — that everything that is spiri­tual or from beneath the ground is sacred — there is little to be said about it. We Maori do not talk about the spirit world very much. We regard it with rever­ence, but we do not talk about it.”

Hence, she believes, the dearth of legend or history about Dactylanthus.

Her own interest in Dactylan­thus is both practical and spiritual. After looking for and finding them over the last 30 years, she says much of her interest or relationship with the plant is instinctive.

“You have to look for signs that are not there, if you know what I mean. The best plants are the ones that are underground. If they are sticking above the surface, most likely they have started to rot or they have been injured by animals.

“I follow the birds,” she ex­plains. “I go to the edge of the bush and I listen for them feeding. Invariably they will be scratching at Dactylanthus deposits, and I can tell if they are. I can’t put a finger on it ­all I can say is that I have a feeling about these things. I will be able to tell if there is Dactylanthus there.”

Nowadays Mrs Garland only goes hunting for Dactylanthus plants for friends, or when she takes her grandchildren into the bush to teach them about nature — just as her father and grandfa­ther taught her to listen to the sounds of nature. “My grandfa­ther could tell by sound when the tide was turning or if a storm was brewing.”

She is strongly committed to conservation values and frowns on selling or trading the wood rose. While she will not say how many she has dug up and cleaned over the years, she says she has given away many as gifts and they are “all over the world”.

“I don’t believe in selling them,” she says, “because they are a gift for people who value nature.”

She has known many people over the years who have gath­ered and sold them commer­cially. Once it was possible to purchase wood roses at interna­tional airports and at the Cha­teau Tongariro.

“I have always believed this is criminal,” she says. “The powers that be have only put their foot down about this in the last few years but they’re 30 or 40 years too late. Time is running out because the only guaranteed way to preserve the Dactylanthus is to remove the animals that are damaging theforest, and that’s impossible.”

She believes deer, goats, pigs and cattle pose just as big a threat as possums.

Mrs Garland reckons ring growth aging puts the average Dactylanthus rose with a diame­ter of 5cm at about 15 years of age.

“They take a long time to grow, and there just isn’t the time or protection in the best growing areas for them to flourish. I worry that they will be lost in the end.”

Fortunately, however, she says very few people know how to find Dactylanthus in the bush. “But I suppose that’s already too many people, because there are still some who harvest them just for the sake of doing it.”

In her experience, the best Dactylanthus colonies are found in marginal land. “They love open, sunny second-growth areas and not the dense forests where the best rimu and totara can be found.”

All of the plants she has found were growing on the roots of five finger, peppertree, lance-wood and broadleaf trees. The biggest have needed to be boiled in 44-gallon drums for several hours. Then, once the fleshy rhizome has been boiled away, the “rose” is cleaned with brushes until it shines.

Her main partner in Dactylan­thus collecting over the years has been Taumarunui naturalist Frank Nola, who has a private timber museum in the town. He has mounted many of the specimens in his museum on display stands or incorporated them in creative works such as hand-carved ornaments.

Staining, polishing and varnishing have all been tried in an attempt to enhance the finished flower, but Nan Garland prefers simply to rub oil into them, leaving a natural, matt finish.

She intends to pass her collection on to her children and grandchildren, while Frank Nola plans to donate his entire museum to the district for permanent presentation as part of a public display.

In the meantime, Mrs Garland is content to continue talking to and showing children in her language classes the Dactylan­thus roses in her home. She also wants to address her Tuwharetoa elders, who preside over large tracts of bushland in the western Taupo region, on the need for conservation — above and below the ground.

“The Dactylanthus is a gift to New Zealand, and like the gift of life we must hold it close to our hearts. If there is a hope of their preservation then we must tell everybody about them.”